Kaja Silverman and Brian Conley will join us on the 11th of November, Veterans Day, for a conversation about this work and more broadly about the visual culture of contemporary conflicts and the continuing relevance of photography in new social media.

For details see the Slought calendar listing.

A new project page for Imaginative Feats Literally Presented has been created.  John’s cover artwork for Judith Butler’s book, Undoing Gender, now has a project entry of its own.  The project page devoted to our residency at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center [PARC] has been updated.  And new installation shots have been added to the Guarded project page and the Flat Land page.

Here it is:

Guarded would have occupied the center of the room, Flat Land the far right side, shielded from Guarded by a rear-screen panel.  Lost doesn’t appear at all.  Hardly workable this.  None of the galleries movable walls figure in this layout; and the old wall that blocks the emergency exit on the lower right wasn’t considered at all.

Goda’s side of the screen features this clip:

Sam’s side of the screen features this one:

And in the space, it looked like this:

About this work they write the following:

Our piece is an attempt to understand the communicative possibilities and limits of collocated still images.  Goda’s slide show constitutes an effort to establish for herself a sense of comfort in the gallery setting and to share that sense with the audience; Sam’s troubles such attempts to engage the audience with photographs, highlighting the contingency of photography by offering a set of images that are conceptually linked but in a non-apparent manner.

And Sam shares this about the new title, thinking/feeling photographs:

I’m not sure how I feel about the new titles; on the one hand, they set up this dichotomy that’s kind of stupid and that the videos don’t necessarily reflect completely.  On the other hand, I kind of like it.

And here’s the gallery plan again:

For more on the installation plan read this prior post.

]]> http://www.finleymuse.com/2009/11/installation-shots-of-imaginative-feats/feed/ 0 http://www.finleymuse.com/2009/11/english-house-gazette-review-of-imaginative-feats/ http://www.finleymuse.com/2009/11/english-house-gazette-review-of-imaginative-feats/#comments Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:04:08 +0000 John Muse http://www.finleymuse.com/?p=827 Mara Miller, a Senior at Haverford, writes eloquently here about our exhibition at Cantor Fitzgerald.  We want to elaborate on one of her points.

Ms. Miller writes,

“[Finley + Muse] want audiences to put aside their opinions on the war itself to empathize with the human lives featured in the piece. An image of a boy kissing a cardboard likeness of his military father is touching, not merely ‘patriotic,’ regardless of whether you find that adjective positive or negative, they said.”

We would expand upon this characterization and say that we want to explore the political uses and abuses of empathy without thereby turning against empathy per se, without condemning feeling and shared vulnerability as mere weaknesses.  Opinions about the war, especially if they are abstract and calculative, often seek to avoid empathy precisely by putting the latter to work; appealing to empathy, whether for making war or for making peace, expose our capacity for compassion to manipulation and deadening.  We do find these images touching—but precisely because they are disturbing, because they are partial, filling the visual field with American bodies, American families, and because they court the very losses they seek to guard against.

Mara Miller concludes with something Jeanne said that should now be even more resonant: “All these are usually images and ideas that people look away from,” she said. “But we want people to look at them.”  Looking here means staying with the disturbance, spending time with the way they solicit, amplify, and attenuate our hopes and fears.

Last week John sent out the following in an email to his past, present, and future students:

As some of you may know, Jeanne C. Finley and I now have an exhibition in the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery.

We would like to make the apparatuses that drive this exhibition available to anyone who creates media for them: you create the DVDs, we replace our DVDs with yours, we consider the consequences, we have a party.

The devices include:

1. a rotating platform with 2 channels of video and 2 channels of audio (what could you do with images that move around the room, our searchlights and aggressive beams?)

2. a flat-panel display with one channel of video and one channel of audio (what would you do with a 16:9 HD display that has to compete with and or complement the rotating platform?)

3. a double-sided screen with 2 channels of video and 2 channels of audio with parabolic speakers (what would you do with a surface with an image on either side, and speakers that isolate sound, putting it right into someone’s head?)

Make five DVDs, make one, make two; make anything you want, but make it fabulous, painful, impressive, and perfect for the device and its formal limits and/or advantages.

If there’s enough interest we could choose an evening to showcase all of the pieces created for these devices.

Feel free to discuss this with anyone you think might be interested; find allies, build teams, etc.

Please contact me as soon as possible if you’re interested: we could take an evening to look at the current show, go over the equipment, and toss around ideas.

Best,
John

John met with 7 students over the last few evenings and discussed the formal possibilities of the devices along with project ideas.  In two weeks we will look at a few of their clips and/or actions in the gallery, and in early December we will reboot the exhibition with their works.  And have a party.

Documentation of Imaginative Feats, like most video installation work, poses specific challenges: because it’s dark, the exposures are long, and as the exposures are long, the moving projectors must be stilled and each of the video works, paused.  We thus have the luxury and responsibility of choosing particular still-frames for each of the projectors and for the flat panel display.  For similar reasons we must bracket for each scene: a few for the ambient light, a few for the projected image.  We then composite the resulting shots.  Which is easier now than it used to be: “Merge to HDR” is our friend.  And finally we must create views that include the various apparatuses—the rotating platform as well as the benches, viewers, parabolic speakers, etc, i.e., machinery of installation—because the point is to show not just what happens, but how.

So, not only is the staging of the work for photographic representation another turn of production, the work exists or fails to exist based on the photographic translation. For example, Guarded was first shown in an intimate space at the Patricia Sweetow Gallery in 2003.  We used the four walls but no rear screens, no complex architecture, no long throws of projections down corridors.  And the documentation represents the space as a whole only through a simple composite:

At LA Freewaves in ‘04 we used 3 6′ by 8′ rear-screens and an existing corner to build a chamber in a much larger space and the results were interesting and have guided us since, both because the relation of inside to outside is now mediated by imagery, and because the documentation of the piece itself is invariably richer.  Here’s a video clip of the set-up at Freewaves:

The documentation clip posted on the Guarded project page combines shots of this Freewaves installation with shots of the version at Sweetow.  The rotator has its drama, but viewers in the space and a view that includes both projections is only possible with rear-screens and more complex spaces.

We’ll soon post Lisa’s documentation of Imaginative Feats.

]]> http://www.finleymuse.com/2009/11/documenting-imaginary-feats/feed/ 0 http://www.finleymuse.com/2009/11/a-few-remarks-on-flat-land/ http://www.finleymuse.com/2009/11/a-few-remarks-on-flat-land/#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:12:29 +0000 John Muse http://www.finleymuse.com/?p=723 We chose not to include Flat Daddies and Flat Stanleys per se in the catalog, opting instead for installation shots from the version we showed at SF Camerawork in 2007 and screen-shots of the websites where we found these images in the first place.  Why?

Flat Land establishes a context for viewing these photographs (and in this show, Guarded and Lost contribute their energies as well), a context structured carefully by the two projections, the two narrations, running simultaneously on either side of a single, suspended, flat projection surface.  And so we feel an obligation to not show the images alone or cite them without lots of contextual supports.

So, for example, when asked for an image from Flat Land we offer this:

Which then appears on the SF Camerawork website like this:

And on the Failure Magazine website like this:

And which was derived from this:

Which we found here.

We use this one image—sans Bush and friend—to stand in for the circulation and handling of the proxies: the daddies and the Stanleys.  Our proxy for theirs, the blank screen of projection, more important than the specific actors.

The first, a drawing of the gallery before the walls were demolished and six 10′ wide “floating” sections installed; the second, a drawing on a “napkin” from May of ‘09; the third, a diagram created in September for the catalog, the fourth, an approximate rendering of the actual installation from a few days ago.

And so did we learn an elementary lesson—again—that every first-year architect must know: moving through a space is not the same as enjoying a two-dimensional drawing of that space.  So many changes: the movable walls of Cantor Fitzgerald presented possibilities that we could only “feel” once we started moving them around.  Guarded allowed us to set back one of these walls, and it became a screen; right proportions, 4:3, and a nice spill over the edges.  This formal stuff—interruptions, gaps in the walls, screens—these “edit” Guarded, breaking up the clockwise flow of the images.

Note that in our napkin drawing, the movable walls, all but the middle on are pushed to the sides.  They disappear in the published version, but come back in the actual diagram, because crucial to the space.  Note too that consistent across these diagrams is the spill of Guarded into the small foyer.  We saw that during our first walk-through.  But too note that we got the direction of rotation wrong in the second diagram—something we should know well enough by now.

And Flat Land needed more space, more throw for the projectors and more room around the screen so that its flatness could be felt, navigated, discovered.  And could use even more.

All the torque of the earlier drawing and diagram doesn’t work so well in the space itself; but offsetting  the back wall just a bit achieves the disorientation even more effectively.  The lesson?  Scale drawings.  But more importantly, scale models.  But working it out on-the-spot, though not ideal, can be an adventure.  This time we got it right.  On the spot.  Mostly.